What are the minimum system requirements for newer PC games?
 

I was watching the Half Life 2 demo and I thought hummm I don't think I'll be able to run that on my system... So what are the minimum system requirements to play current PC games? And I'm talking about FPS games here, not Monopoly. :)

Well, for current FPS games, a DX8 compatible video card and a 800mhz or better proc and 128mb of ram should be sufficient for decent frame rates and special effects. Minimum? I don't know - check the boxes. I wouldn't recommend the minimums. For Half-Life 2 - you need a DX9 video card - a Geforce 4 or better or an ATI 9500 or better, a 1ghz processor or better and 256mb of ram preferably. That's the ballpark you wanna shoot for anyway.

btw - half life 2 will run on a lesser system, but you won't get all the effects or graphics enhancements.

For good performance, the basics are :
512 megs of ram
64 megs video
1.5 Ghz cpu
Dx8.1 (or even 9)

The rest should not matter very much

About 20x the $ of a PS2 or Xbox. :D

So - 20 x $180 = $3600

My PC cost me less than half of that including monitor and 5.1 klipsch speakers (a year ago) and it'll be able to run Half Life 2 and Doom 3 just fine.

Besides - Half-Life 2 is about 40x better looking than anything on PS2 or Xbox. :D

Okay okay.. 10x. Happy? ;)

Well, I spend at least 10x as much time with my PC than I do on all of my consoles combined, so yeah - I guess I'm happy. :p ;)

I have an Xbox. But I want to play Half Life 2. :)

I have an Athlon 1 ghz, 256 megs or RAM, and a Radeon DDR 64 so I might be able to play after all albeit with some of the effects turned off.

You can drop 180 bucks on a Radeon 9600 and see all the effects with that setup - if you have Windows XP, you might wanna drop 30 bucks and get another 256MB of ram too.